#golgathae

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: “so i guess this is the part where we stop acting like this is the last time we’re going to see each other.” zombie apoc au /:

“Will you get back over here.” he’s very aware that he’s hissing straight through his teeth, but he can’t quite unclench his jaw long enough to make it sound easy. “You want me to be honest with you here? You ain’t got enough rounds for this.” 

roxy and jane pull him one way, jake pulls him the other. for the first time in a long time, dirk feels adrift. unmoored. his knuckles whiten on the hilt of his sword, because if he acts like he can defend, it must be true. never mind the fence dividing them, never mind the horde on the horizon, never mind the gnawing fear in dirk’s gut that this will be the last time jake english frustrates and fascinates him in the same instant. “Jake, I’m serious. I don’t want you to do this.” 

but he’s going to, and dirk knows that. no amount of persuasion from a man with his fingers tangled in a chainlink fence will convince him otherwise. roxy shouts over the sound of gunfire, not afraid, but heavy with effort, and dirk flinches towards the sound. “You better come out the other side,” he says, voice thick with what he convinces himself is determination and not fear. aggression and not emotion. “You fucking better.”

[timaeuse]

@golgathae, here.

you’re not breathing. he’s kissing you for real and you are not breathing, because there’s so much going on and your brain is shutting down all of your organs so you have more time to process it. your hand finds purchase in the front of his shirt weakly, keeping him near, even if you aren’t exactly reciprocating to the best of your ability. then he’s gone, and you feel absolutely bereft. thank god for your shades. you’re convinced you’re giving him the most disgusting puppy eyes right now. oh, god, say something. earth c to dirk, say something.

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: “ i know i’ve kissed you before, but i didn’t do it right. “ they can have 500 dumb kiss interactions who cares

dirk knows that if he opens his mouth to protest, the moment goes away. it’s happened before and he has no doubt it’ll happen again, when he’s too starstruck to be thoughtful. now, though, he catches the thought before it flickers into malignancy and holds onto it, soothes it over with the knowledge that there’s plenty of time later, when jake isn’t holding him and he isn’t holding jake just as tightly, with just as much affection. he bumps their foreheads together, more accidentally than anything, but it means their eyes meet and the twisting nerves in his gut explode into something much scarier, much more unique to jake.

“Feel free to try again. I’m a play until you win kind of guy,” he says, but his voice is too quiet, too earnest to make the joke land right. dirk’s gaze skitters, only for a moment, accompanying the cogs between his ears as they grind slowly back to life. “I mean -- oh, fuck it.” he moves closer, just as eager to shut himself up as he is to kiss jake, let everything go quiet in his head. “You want to do the honours?”

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: ‘hear that, babe? we’re legends.’

they are talking about the prince and the page.

dirk has his jacket’s hood up over his head, the long curls of his hair pulled behind his ears by an elastic band he’d stolen out of one of his projects that morning. the makeshift disguise hides his face well enough, but not his shades -- his is not an easy face to miss in a crowd, and dirk supposes jake is even harder to overlook. how much peace they have is dependent on how long it takes someone to recognise them, and, from dirk’s experience, they’re on borrowed time. 

even so, peace is peace. dirk slips his fingers into jake’s palm, and they find the gaps in which they fit effortlessly. 

“They’re getting the story wrong,” he muses as he pulls jake’s hand to his mouth, presses a kiss to his knuckles. “Legends, but poorly-translated ones. I’ll bet Icarus didn’t even fall that far. The consorts just wanted something to gossip about.”

being the prince of heart seems so far away, now. dirk often wonders if that had just been another splinter of himself; if he was just being who he needed to be at the time. when he doesn’t wear the emblem, he doesn’t remember the power. it’s funny -- the dying, he recalls vividly, but the strength shies from him. he supposes it doesn’t matter. if they still see him that way, the odd little creatures he’d somehow adopted in his pursuit of a life that he wanted to wake up to, then so be it. 

he’s learning to let belief subside him. 

“Well, Page of Hope,” Dirk says, nudging closer to Jake’s side and sliding their hands into the back pocket of his own jeans, “We got a festival to get to, I think. How I dread the idea of being late and missing out on my little crown of flowers.”

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: ❛ Oh, is that a challenge? ❜

dirk has stopped taking his sword to the roof with him. that is to say, dirk has stopped believing that something is waiting there to kill him. he swings his legs over the ledge and stands smoothly, still slouched, more casual than he ever thought he’d be able to allow. ‘Did it sound like one?’ he raises an eyebrow when he asks, and takes a step forward. ‘I think you’re just fond of competition.’ just as fond as dirk is of winning, as a matter of fact. he smiles, broad, but not sharp. ‘Feel free to prove me wrong, hotshot. I ain’t too eager to sleep with one eye open tonight.’

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: “in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. and i think that part of me still believes that's what love is.”

parts of him ache with memory. a still-sparking heart glowing green in the sunlight. the feeling of being torn apart but pushed together and suffocated underneath something that doesn’t belong to him. dirk closes his eyes so that the way he winces is less pronounced. knowing a volcano is erupting nearby but feeling none of the heat, hearing none of the explosion. pure hollywood. 

“Yeah.” his lip curls. he can’t exactly dispute this as well as he’d like. dirk’s no stranger to grand gestures -- or, rather, taking a backseat as other aspects of himself plan them. or is it more his fault for believing they’d speak for him? the one thing he’s sure of is that when he was younger, he’d seen the graduate and spent three hours discussing the ending with the auto responder. they’d disagreed viciously, as they so often did: the ar had assured him that confessing everything in the face of rejection was brave, where dirk had found it reckless and idiotic. he thinks of that scene now, the woman in her wedding gown, the back of the bus, the pervasive sense of what have i done. a knot of anxiety twists tight in his stomach, and he breathes out hard against it, quiet in the cold. “I mean, I don’t blame you for it. I thought that too, for a while. It was the only type of love you and I got to see.”

movies didn’t go into the afterwards, the mundane. dirk understands why; it isn’t fun to watch a couple still drowsy with sleep disagree over breakfast options, or plan date nights every thursday because otherwise they’d be too busy looking for and losing themselves miles apart. an audience is shown the grandiose and it is meant to bring them comfort. the audience is shown the prince in the tower and is reassured that one day, he will be saved. 

“I guess the grand gesture trope isn’t necessarily always bad in person.” it’s when it’s all they can do that it becomes a crutch. one showstopping romance number isn’t enough to offset the mess they’d made before. he knows that now, better than he did when he was thirteen, better than he did when he was sixteen, better than he did three weeks ago. dirk is always learning, always doing his best to add to what he knows instead of demolishing it and starting again whenever he doubts. 

“I like the smaller moments better, though.” when they wake up within twenty minutes of each other. when he blinks his eyes open and jake turns back to his phone just a few seconds too slow. the one time he’d flipped a pancake fucking perfectly and they’d saved that one for last. when jake tracks mud into his workshop and dirk catches the flash of camera in the corner of his eye and pretends not to notice. when roxy asks him how things are and dirk thinks of jake before he answers fine. “I think it’s all love, but the big declarations of it aren’t permanent enough. It isn’t something you have to prove by going out of your way to do so. You prove it by making an effort where it counts, and where it counts can be arbitrary.” he doesn’t want to ramble, but something feels important and it’s just out of his reach. maybe he’s trying to say i love you. maybe he’s always trying to say that. 

“Regardless, this isn’t TV.” he says it like it’s just a statement. “Flawed folk can do as many big surprises and plot convoluted dates all they want, but they’re still flawed.” he’s trying not to talk about himself, but he falls into the trap often when he’s talking about how people fall short. “It takes more than that. But I guess that’s not as fun to sit through for an hour a week.” it sure is shitty to live through, after all.

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: ❛ You don’t like me? Do you? Like in a more than a friend way? ❜

he could say no.

dirk could, in theory, cut off his own nose to spite his face. he’s so good at it, after all; taking something he has and deciding he doesn’t deserve it just yet, pushing it away with a sense that eventually, when he’s good enough, when the job is done, he can come back to it without feeling like he’s taking, stealing. if jake deserves anything at all, it’s dirk at his best, and if jake’s gotten anything from him besides ignorance lately, it’s someone else entirely. when dirk turns his face away, staring hard at the horizon, red flickers in front of his eyes, predictions and suggestions and calculations that should mean something but don’t and maybe never did. 

his fingers curl into his palm so that most of his weight rests on his knuckles. it’s uncomfortable, but it means the invasive heat that radiates from jake’s skin is further away. it means that dirk is further away, and it means that he isn’t reaching for jake by any stretch of the imagination, and it means that dirk is the one calling the shots, here. he controls distance and he controls his answer and the variables don’t have to matter so much. 

he breathes in until his ribs hurt. the dull ache gives him something other than the whirlpool in his mind to focus on, if only for a second. when he breathes out, he’s the only one in his head. he shrugs.

he could say no, but he won’t.

“Would it be so bad if I did?” he’s always been able to say so much and say so little. dirk’s chin drops to rest on his chest so he can watch the toes of his shoes knock together, a steady, reliable clunk that seems to reverberate all the way up to his knees. this isn’t how he thought it would go. he had so much he wanted to say. “You’re a pretty damn likeable guy, English.”

the way his throat tightens reminds dirk of obstacles, of disruption, of the error in a line of code usually being three lines previous, and then he’s thinking about time and distance and girls and boys and how all of it should have stopped getting in his way the second he blinked death out of his eyes but it only seems to press tighter now that it’s gone. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal.” it comes out flat, but dirk feels his skin start to crawl, because he knows he’s apologising. “What happens on LOTAK stays on LOTAK, all that jazz.”

[timaeuse]

@golgathae said: ‘all i need is a smile.’

‘Not even a please, huh.’ dirk ducks his head as he speaks, corners of his mouth twitching at jake’s command. not for the first time, dirk allows himself a moment to be blown away by just how powerful jake is -- the world bends to his will when he asks. well, he thinks, not without a wry little raise of his brow, the world can get in line. he’s been doing that for years, and people seem way less impressed by it. 

he never needed hope for that, though. jake’s hold on him is entirely his own, no matter how uneasy that makes dirk. when he looks up again, the grin he’s wearing is crooked, wary. still unsure of not only the expression, but the feeling that goes along with it. he’s still learning how to feel at ease with being in love after all these years. ‘There. That give you your fix? Be warned, English -- I see even a hint of one of those six mobile devices you got stashed away, the slightest flash of a camera, I’m cuttin’ you all the way off.’